Petty squabbles - Banking inquiry

AS Brendan Behan once so colourfully put it, the first item on the agenda of any Irish committee meeting is ‘The Split’.

That is exactly what emerged over the weekend after the hastily convened emergency meeting on Saturday of the Oireachtas Banking Inquiry.

The inquiry is under huge pressure to produce a report for its January 20 deadline and appeared to have been saved from the brink of collapse after the holding of those crisis talks to address concerns among members over its draft report.

Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy and Labour senator Susan O’Keeffe will head up a ‘report finalisation team’.

However, considering what Socialist TD Joe Higgins had to say, there is every prospect that it may never emerge. He regards the draft report as ‘unamendable’ and is preparing to publish an alternative.

Whatever the differences, the Irish electorate who paid for this report deserve better than an unseemly squabble among politicians. It is incumbent on them to show better behaviour than the bankers.